Described herein is an operator control apparatus for a motor vehicle. An operating element which is held in a housing such that it can be deflected in a translatory manner is provided by the operator control apparatus. The operating element can be, for example, a touchscreen. In this case, the operating element is resiliently mounted, for which purpose a spring element which applies a restoring force to the operating element in the direction of an inoperative position is provided. A motor vehicle including the operator control apparatus is also described herein.
An operator control apparatus is described in German Patent Application 103 12 338 A1. According to the document, a touch-sensitive detection apparatus is mounted in a housing on four spring strips, each of the spring strips being bent in the shape of a dome and being mounted on two supporting elements. The respective dome-shaped formation is arranged between the two supporting elements and serves as a support point for the detection apparatus. In the case of an arrangement of this kind, it is difficult to arrange an actuator for providing haptic feedback on the detection apparatus since, here, the detection apparatus is independently mounted at four points and the actuator accordingly has to be able to act on all four support points for effective haptic feedback.
Four-fold input of haptic signals is described by Korean Patent Application 2012 000 1302 A. According to the document, a movably mounted operating element in the form of a panel is mounted on four vibration loudspeakers which hold the panel and apply a vibration as required. One disadvantage of this arrangement is that resilient mounting of the panel is possible only to a limited extent since the vibration loudspeakers have to be structurally adapted for this purpose.
German Patent Application 10 2006 021 593 A1 describes an actuator device for generating a vibration signal on an operating element, which actuator device is fastened directly to the operating element and, on account of its mass inertia, can input a vibration into the operating element. One disadvantage of this solution is that, owing to the arrangement of the relatively heavy actuator device on the operating element, the operating element is slow and therefore can be operated by a user only with a correspondingly large operating force.